Bogart

by Stephen Humphrey Bogart

  “But I spell it ‘kreep,’ with a k, not a c,” Bogie said.

  “But how can you do this to me?”

  “I did it for the publicity, for the studio and you,” Bogie told him.

  I suspect that the Bogart-Warner battles were special because Jack Warner could be as tactless as Dad. Once when Warner was introduced to Madame Chiang Kai-shek, he allegedly muttered that he had forgotten to bring his laundry.

  I asked Sam Jaffe what my father and Warner fought about.

  “Scripts,” Sam said. “Jack Warner knew your father was a good actor, but he would never consider him for better roles. I remember one time Bogart wouldn’t do a certain picture. Warner said to me, ‘Sam, you have no control of your client.’ I said, ‘Jack, I can’t control Bogart’s mind. He reads scripts and he knows what he wants to do. I can’t tell him what to do.’ This was when they had what were called slave contracts, and the studio could lay Bogie off if he rejected a story. So he was always getting suspended. Warner would hand Bogie a script and Bogie would read it and say, ‘This is a piece of crap.’ The Warners never bought a really good book or play for him. They would get some lousy script and give it to your father just so they could comply with the contract requirement that they offer him a script. But Bogie always said it was crap. He used that word, crap, a lot.”

  Talking about his conflicts with Warner, my father said, “I’d read a movie script and yell that it was not right for me. I’d be called for wardrobe and refuse to report. Jack Warner would phone and say, ‘Be a good sport.’ I’d say no. Then I’d get a letter from the Warner Brothers lawyers ordering me to report. I’d refuse. Then another wire from Warner saying that if I did not report he’d cut my throat. He’d always sign it, Love to Mayo.” (My father’s wife during much of this haggling.)

  I was happy to hear that my father fought with Warner about scripts. We are always hearing that everybody in Hollywood these days cares only about the deal, not the movie. My father, admittedly, played in a lot of stinkers, but he was always fighting for better movies and better scripts, never for bigger paychecks.

  Jack Warner certainly was not the only Hollywood figure to get the Bogart needle. Bogie often slammed Hollywood figures in print. And he was annoyed and amused when people found this outrageous.

  He said, “All over Hollywood they are continually advising me, ‘Oh, you mustn’t say that. That will get you in a lot of trouble,’ when I remark that some picture or director or writer or producer is no good. I don’t get it. If he isn’t any good why can’t you say so? If more people would mention it, pretty soon it might have some effect. The local idea that anyone making a thousand dollars a week is sacred and is beyond the realm of criticism never strikes me as particularly sound.”

  The press, of course, loved the fact that Bogie was outspoken and irreverent. They found him very quotable because he did not dish out the pablum they were used to.

  “I believe in speaking my mind,” Bogie said. “I don’t believe in hiding anything. If you are ashamed of anything, correct it. There’s nothing I won’t talk about. I’ve never gone along with the social structure of this town and as a result I don’t have many close friends among the actors.”

  My father was outspoken not just about Hollywood, but about everything. He loved to argue. This is certainly one area in which I am my father’s son. I love to argue just for the fun of it. I’ll take the opposite side on any issue just to watch the sparks fly. Dad was stimulated by the music of the words and the exchange of ideas. And he was amused by the positions people held on various topics. One of his favorite tricks was to say something outrageous in a group, get a debate going, and then sneak away while the others continued arguing.

  Bogie said, “I can’t even get in a mild discussion without turning it into an argument. There must be something in my tone of voice, or this arrogant face. Something that antagonizes everybody. Nobody likes me on sight. I suppose that’s why I’m cast as the heavy.

  “The thing is, I can’t understand why people get mad. You can’t live in a vacuum, and you can’t have a discussion without two sides. If you don’t agree with the other fellow, that’s what makes it a discussion. I’d feel like a sap, starting things by throwing in with my opponent and saying, ‘Well, of course, you may be right,’ or ‘You know more about it than I do,’ and all the other half-baked compromises the tact and diplomacy boys use. My idea of an honest discussion is to begin by declaring my opinion. Then, when the other fellow says, ‘Why you’re nothing but a goddamned fool, Bogart,’ things begin to move and we can get somewhere. Or, I’m the one that pulls that line on him. Anyway, it gets a lot of action.”

  Because my father was burdened with the screen image of being a tough guy, he was often confronted by jerks who wanted to test him so they could boast in the office the next day about how they had drawn down on Bogie the tough guy.

  It was always a difficult spot for Dad. Usually his wit could win over these dolts, who often as not were drunk. But Bogie couldn’t always wisecrack his way out of a sticky situation. Sometimes things got physical.

  Because Dad was not well known during the time of his marriages to Mary Philips and Helen Menken, most of his physical fights occurred during his third marriage, to Mayo Methot, from 1938 to 1945. In fact, she was involved in many of them. One night, for example, he and Mayo were closing down a bar. Some guy came over to their table, leaned down real close to my father and said, “I hear you’re a tough guy. But they must have been talking about somebody else, because you don’t look so tough to me.”

  “You’re probably right,” my father said. “Why don’t you sit down, pal, and have a drink on me.”

  The man accepted my father’s offer. But soon he started getting belligerent again. “You know what I heard?” he said.

  “No,” Bogie said, “what did you hear?”

  “I heard you won’t sign autographs for kids. I heard you’re too tough for that, you just brush them off.”

  Bogie could see that he wasn’t going to charm this guy into submission, so he turned to Mayo and suggested it was time to quit for the night.

  “Just what I thought,” the stranger said. “You’re trying to run out. Tough, huh? That’s a laugh.”

  Suddenly, the man took a swing at my father. My father ducked and caught only a slight glancing blow. Then they started grappling and finally ended up on the floor of this New York night spot. Mayo yanked off one of her shoes and began banging the man with it. Finally the manager had to step in and break up the brawl.

  “Darling,” Mayo later said, “it must be wonderful to be a movie star and receive such recognition from your fans.”

  If Dad’s being a movie star sometimes got him into trouble, there were other times when he used his screen persona to create trouble. One time at a restaurant a friend of his, knowing Bogie’s love for pranks, came up behind my father and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “All right,” the friend said, “finish your drink and get out of here. We don’t want you in this place.”

  Bogart turned slowly, looked carefully around the room, then took the cigarette out of his mouth and flipped it onto the floor, grinding it out. He narrowed his eyes, spat out the last of the cigarette smoke, and said, “Listen, pal, I’m staying here. If you don’t like it you can move along. This is my territory and you know it. Or do I have to prove it to you?”

  The people in the restaurant were getting nervous now and some of them started putting distance between themselves and Bogart. Bogie let the tension hang in the room for a moment, then he started laughing.

  This was something he did a lot, and sometimes he would get into fake fights, pulling his punches the way he had to in the movies.

  Many of my father’s pranks would be big hits today on David Letterman. When Bogie was in Paris with Mother, Peter Viertel, and Joan Fontaine, he picked up a street wino and invited him to join them all for dinner. After dinner he gave the bum fifty bucks and a cigar. Also in Paris, he picked u
p a prostitute and introduced her around as his fiancee.

  When I was eight months old, Bogie went back to New York and his visit to the El Morocco club led to one of the most infamous stories of his mischief.

  The story, as it appeared in newspapers the next day, was that Bogie and Bacall were in New York on vacation. They went out nightclubbing with Bogie’s friend Bill Seeman and other friends. Around midnight my mother and the others went home, but Bogie and Seeman stayed out to continue carousing. They arrived at El Morocco after midnight, carrying two giant stuffed pandas, which my father had bought for me. They introduced the pandas all around as their “dates,” and asked to be seated at a table for four, so their pandas could have chairs. They propped the pandas, which were over three feet high, in the chairs and proceeded to drink.

  At a nearby table two young women, one a socialite, the other a well-known fashion model, were having drinks with their dates. At one point one of the young women came over and picked up one of the pandas. Bogie, offended, pushed her and she fell to the floor. When the other young woman picked up the other panda, Bogie said something insulting to her. At that point the second woman’s boyfriend got into the act and started throwing dishes. This was followed by a melee, the details of which were not clear to anybody. My father, his friend, and their pandas were thrown out of El Morocco and banned from the club forever.

  My father, admitting he was drunk at the time and that he was not completely clear on the sequence of events, tells a similar story but with important differences.

  “My wife had some sense and went home to bed,” he says, “which I guess is where I should have been. But Mr. Seeman and myself went on to make it a stag party. It seemed like a good idea to us to buy a couple of those huge pandas as a present for my son and it seemed like a very good idea to take them to El Morocco for a nightcap.

  “Mr. Seeman and myself were sitting perfectly quietly around a table for four at about three forty-five A.M. when some Jane I never saw before tried to steal one of the pandas on a bet or something. I couldn’t let that happen, could I?

  “So I wrestled the panda away from the girl. I guess she did fall down. I’d never hit a lady. They’re too dangerous. But those pandas were huge, almost as big as she was, and she must have gotten a little top heavy. Anyway, she looked as if she’d been drinking too many Coca-Colas.”

  Bogie denied that the other woman’s date had assaulted him with plates. “Nobody threatened me,” he says. “I would have pasted him. There was no slugging and nobody got hurt.” In telling his story to the papers, he even managed to quote Shakespeare. “It was just a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” he said. “You know how it is at that hour of the morning when everybody’s had quite a few drinks. Anyway, Mr. Seeman and myself and our two pandas left the club under our own steam.”

  A few days later my father was served with a summons in his suite at the St. Regis. The model was accusing him of assault, and claiming back and neck injuries. My uncle, Charlie Weinstein, was Bogie’s lawyer.

  “I thought this was a tempest in a teapot,” Bogie said, “but it has grown into a full-size hurricane. Sure, I’ll appear in court tomorrow. They tell me I’d better or else. They send policemen after you, put you in jail, and do other bad things. I think the girls are both very pretty. Too pretty to have to do anything like this for publicity. So I don’t know what the score is. I’ll tag along and see.”

  The model was also suing my father for twenty-five thousand bucks, but he didn’t take it too seriously. In court he was asked, “Were you drunk at the time?” He replied, “Isn’t everybody at three in the morning?” The case was dropped.

  My mother tells me, “The funny thing about the pandas is that when Bogie took them home you wouldn’t play with them and you didn’t even look at them for three years. When you were four you used to ride them when you watched cowboy films on television.”

  It was the panda incident more than others that cemented my father’s reputation as a carouser. A couple of months later he was quoted in a newspaper column as saying that New York was a fun town, implying that the city’s clubs and restaurants closed their eyes to drunkenness and disorderly conduct. My father thought such carousing was becoming a lost art, at least among movie stars. “Errol Flynn and I are the only ones left who do any good old hell-raising,” he said.

  The head of New York’s Society of Restaurateurs responded by saying that Bogart and Errol Flynn would get the “bum’s rush” the next time they tried to “get stiff and raise hell.”

  “New York restaurant owners don’t condone misbehavior by big movie stars, millionaires, or anyone else,” he said. “This is a clean town. There isn’t a public place here that wouldn’t give Bogart, Flynn, or anyone else the boot if they carried on in a disturbing manner.”

  One prominent theatrical publicist at the time was sure that this outrageous night life would ruin my father’s career. “If that guy doesn’t get wise to himself pretty soon and stop trying to make like he’s in the movies all the time, he’ll be finished,” he said.

  Of course, by the time of the panda incident my father was married to Bacall, and he was also fifty years old. Both of these things inhibited wild nightlife, and he was really not the party animal he once had been.

  Still, he was concerned about the image of him that was being created. Just before he left to film The African Queen he said, “Some people think the only thing I’ve done is get involved in barroom bouts. Why, I’ve been in over forty plays. I’ve done some lasting things, too. What they are I can’t think of at the moment, but there must have been some.”

  My father was a guy who had a lot to say about a lot of things, including celebrity reporting.

  “People who live in glass houses need ear plugs and a sense of humor,” he said. “If they hear everything that’s said about them and are disturbed by everything they hear, they’ll go through life in a constant state of hypertension and high blood pressure. By the nature of my profession I live in a glass house. When I chose to be an actor I knew I’d be working in the spotlight. I also knew that the higher a monkey climbs the more you can see of his tail. So I keep my sense of humor and go right along leading my life and enjoying it. I wouldn’t trade places with anybody.

  “Like many another honest burgher, my vices are reasonably modest and unspectacular. But some of the stories you should hear. I have an interesting, never dull, but hardly scandalous life. I am not going about slugging people in saloons, chasing starlets, smoking marijuana, or otherwise making headlines. Of course, I express an opinion now and then, but it’s all in fun. So if people want to create a legend of a hell-raising Bogie, in keeping with some of my film roles, it is necessary that they invent little stories and pass them along as authentic.”

  Though my father eventually ran out of energy for late-night drinking, he never tired of pranks. There are many stories about my father’s mischief and there is no reason to doubt most of them. However, I’ve learned that my father’s impishness was so legendary that it has spawned a good many stories which are suspect.

  One story that is true, though, concerns the time when my father made Action in the North Atlantic with Raymond Massey. There was a scene where he and Massey were supposed to jump from a burning tanker ship into a burning oil slick on the ocean. Of course, stunt doubles would be doing the jumping for the high-priced talent.

  “My double is braver than your double,” Bogie said to Massey.

  “Like hell, he is,” Massey said. “My double is twice as brave as your double.”

  Somehow this disagreement became a discussion of which actor was the braver and before long the men had machoed their way into doing the stunt themselves. Both of them got burned slightly, but not seriously, leaping into the water. The director, of course, was horrified that millions of Warner Brothers dollars had been put in jeopardy by the prank, which made it all the more enjoyable for my father.

  On that same film, Bogie told Dane Clark, who then was
waiting to be built up as “the new Bogart,” that Warner’s was going to change Clark’s name to Jose O’Toole and make him into a new Irish-South American sensation. Clark apparently fell for it, and had a big blow-up with Jack Warner, until the two of them figured out that Bogie had tricked them.

  Richard Brooks, the director, tells a Bogie story concerning chess. My father was a great chess player, but Mike Romanoff was better. Brooks says that one time Bogie and Romanoff were playing a series of games and Romanoff had to pay a hundred bucks to charity if my father won a certain number of them. During this series of games the prince had to go into the hospital for some minor surgery and they decided they would keep playing the chess match, by phone. But Bogie set it up so that he played in his booth at Romanoff’s and he had two phones handy. Romanoff would call in with his move and Bogie would stall for time before making a counter move. Then he’d get on the other phone and call some big US chess champion who would tell him what moves to make.

  Swifty Lazar told me about the time my father pushed him in the pool at Sinatra’s house. When Swifty got even by pushing Bogie into the pool my father was really pissed off because he was wearing a very expensive watch that my mother had just bought him. “What the hell are you going to do about this?” he asked, handing Swifty the soaked watch. “I’m going to dry it off,” Swifty said and he tossed the watch in the fireplace. The next day he bought my father a Mickey Mouse watch to replace it, but eventually he replaced the expensive one.

  Inevitably, Dad became the target of pranksters, as well. Sybil Christopher, who used to be Sybil Burton, told me, “I remember one time Richard and Betty playing a trick. Bogie was working on a film and when he got home Richard was lying on the couch, wearing Bogie’s pajamas. But Bogie outsmarted them; he just said hello, and pretended nothing was odd. Bogie would not admit that Richard was wearing his pajamas—he didn’t react at all. The joke fell flat because Bogie outsmarted them.”